If we have been managers or beneficiaries of modern economic development, we may confess that habits of carelessness, motivations of greed, and corruptions of power have stood in the way of tilling carefully and sharing fairly. These factors have heightened the ancient temptation to seek security and material abundance beyond what is sufficient for members of human community on a finite planet... Surely we have been too uncritical, too unbiblical, too self-serving in going along with our culture’s abuse of nature and its pursuit of affluence. We have been blind and deaf in our servanthood and stewardship (Isa 42:19), stubbornly slow to heed the warnings that have been given. (Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Restoring Creation for Ecology and Justice, 1990.)

We learn in Genesis that God has promised to fulfill all of creation, not just humanity, and has made humans the stewards of it. More importantly, God sent Christ into the very midst of creation to be “God with us” and to fulfill the promise to save humankind and nature. God’s redemption makes the creation whole, the place where God’s will is being done on earth as it is in heaven... (Church of the Brethren, Creation: Called to Care, 1991.)

In the New Testament we learn that Christ not only restores and reconciles our relationship to God, Christ also restores our right relationship to the creation of which we are a part. Our new life in Christ consists of a restored relationship to both God and creation. As people in the Body of Christ, we and all of creation move toward the fulfillment and wholeness intended for everything through Christ. We are not delivered from this world; nor are we simply assured of a greater spiritual reality lying beyond this world.

Rather the bodily resurrection of Christ means that the power of sin and death is defeated, and the new creation is breaking forth in this world. (Reformed Church in America, Care for the Earth: Theology and Practice, 1982).

Ethical Principles
Stewardship

The earth belongs to God, as affirmed in Psalm 24:1. We are caretakers or stewards... Our responsibility as stewards is one of the most basic relationships we have with God. It implies a great degree of caring for God’s creation and all God’s creatures. The right relationships embodied in the everlasting convenant to which Isaiah refers. There can be no justice without right relationships of creatures with one another and with all of creation. Eco-justice is the vision of the garden in Genesis — the realm and the reality of right relationship. (American Baptist Church, American Baptist Policy Statement on Ecology, 1989.)